In the South African context where unemployment, socioeconomic inequalities, and municipal failures have led to alternative means of survival, waste pickers have emerged as key yet unrecognised contributors to waste management. Despite their significant environmental and economic impact, their labour remains informal and largely overlooked. This paper examines the lived experiences of waste pickers working at a landfill in Makhanda, South Africa. It explores how waste pickers navigate precarious livelihoods while sorting and repurposing disposed goods, contributing to local recycling industries. In particular, it foregrounds the affective and contingent realities of waste picking on a landfill. Based on ethnographic research, the paper investigates how waste pickers navigate life on the margins of urban space, shaped by structural inequalities and persistent municipal failures. Thus, it focuses on the duality of waste picking as both a survival strategy and an embodied practice of resistance. By engaging with the everyday struggles of waste pickers, the paper highlights how precarity can diminish capacities, while also becoming a mobilising force. By framing waste as generative, this study illuminates how those living on society’s margins actively reshape their urban environments. The paper contributes to current debates on the role of waste pickers within the formal waste economy in South Africa.